Recent
African immigrants face enormous barriers to health care due to
language challenges, their uninsured status and lack of familiarity
with health care systems in the U.S.
The major health needs in the African immigrant community in New
York City include primary prevention, screening and treatment of
infectious disease, including tropical infectious diseases, OB/GYN
care, screening for vision impairment and ocular disease, and blood
pressure and diabetes screening and treatment.
African Services has aggressively sought to fill this gap in health
care access, and by providing supportive services that address the
social and economic factors affecting the most vulnerable African
immigrants.
Barriers Faced by African Immigrants in Accessing Health Care
The health rights of immigrants are legally protected in New York
City; however, many African immigrants do not know how to independently
access centralized primary care or even localized public health clinic
facilities, shy away from public services in general from fear of
immigration authorities, and are largely uninsured or underinsured.
Learn more about the health rights of immigrants from The New York Immigration Coalition's publication, Access to Health Care for Uninsured Immigrants details the rights of uninsured immigrants in New York City.
Language is the primary barrier to effectively accessing healthcare
for most African immigrants. Of nearly 10,000 newcomers African
Services serves each, only 12 percent speak English fluently. Only a
handful of healthcare providers have the capacity to serve African
patients in French. Of the major non-European African languages spoken
widely in the African communities of New York City Pulaar, Wolof,
Mandingo, and Soninke are not spoken by medical or social work staff
and are not available through the language bank in a single one of the
fifteen New York City Health and Hospital Corporation hospitals nor in
the ten NYC Department of Health STD or TB Clinics.
Beyond language facility, most healthcare providers are unfamiliar
with the cultural context of African patients. African Services acts as
a bridge between the African community and healthcare providers, and
helps providers to improve their cultural competency in providing
effective care to African patients. A shortage of peer health workers
is also acute in the African immigrant community, which is often
accustomed to the community health worker model in their countries of
origin.
Chronic Disease and African Immigrants
There is an urgent need to increase awareness and access to early
intervention services for non-communicable chronic disease affecting
African immigrants. The incidence of chronic disease is extremely high
amongst the African-born: the ratio of deaths from non-communicable
disease to deaths from infectious and parasitic disease will be 1:1 for
Africans by 2015 (WHO).
Chronic disease prevention and treatment is important for conditions
which either disproportionately affect people of African descent, such
as diabetes and high blood pressure, or in which people of African
descent suffer from lack of screening and prevention services including
cardiovascular disease and cancer.
African-Americans have prevalence rates of diabetes at a rate that
is 70% higher than white Americans and lower survival rates for cancer
due to late diagnosis (CDC). The status of recent immigrants of African
origin is even more precarious--exacerbated by non-fluency in English
and economic instability.
